Starting a new restaurant from scratch is hard. Most close within the first five years, and many within one year. One of the biggest drains on a restauranteur's up-front investment is real estate, especially in a city. That's also where the competition is strongest. More restaurant failures in the last couple of years have been in dine-in establishments -even before they become established. But people gotta eat, so landlords have stepped in to fuel a rising trend: ghost kitchens. They are just kitchens, no dining area, and they are often shared spaces.  

Similar to food trucks, the appeal of ghost kitchens is simple: They’re a way for people who have dreams of starting a restaurant, but are worried about the overhead costs, to do so without risking losing the entirety of their investment. The idea is that a ghost kitchen, which allows for multiple “restaurants” to produce food using the same physical space while also sharing equipment and ingredients, will cost a fraction of opening up a brick-and-mortar restaurant. “With a ghost kitchen, you rent from a landlord at a facility like Kitchens United or CloudKitchens, usually located in densely populated areas,” reports Roaming Hunger. “From there, you get your brand onto an app like Uber Eats or DoorDash, and (hopefully) start getting customers. Then you send out orders from the rented kitchen space. Ghost kitchens can be used to launch an entirely new business, or to expand the delivery range for an existing brand.”

The question is, how does this affect small eateries that already exist? No one knows yet, but it could be like the way newspapers are going bankrupt now that everyone can get information online. Read about the trend of ghost kitchens at Mel magazine. -via Digg

Hall and Oates had a string of hits in the 1970s and '80s that made them household names. But it took a strange run of unsavory events to make them a duo. Daryl Hall and John Oates attended Temple University at the same time, and both were in doo-wop groups, but somehow they never met until that one night. Hall sang for The Temptones and Oates was in The Masters. Both groups were recording and trying to break out into the mainstream.

In 1967, both bands were invited to perform at a dance event promoted by area disc jockey Jerry Bishop at the Adelphi Ballroom on North 52nd Street in Philadelphia. According to Oates, the concert was a professional obligation: Bishop had the ability to give songs airtime.

“When Jerry Bishop contacted you, you had to go,” Oates told Pennsylvania Heritage magazine in 2016. “If you didn’t, your record wouldn’t get played on the radio.”

That’s how Hall and Oates found themselves backstage at the Adelphi, each preparing to perform with their respective group. (Oates said Hall looked good in a sharkskin suit with the rest of his partners, whereas he felt more self-conscious in a “crappy houndstooth” suit.) While Oates had previously seen The Temptones perform, the two had never met nor spoken. It’s possible they never would have if it weren’t for what happened next.

It happened that some of the singing groups came from high school fraternities with a violent attitude for their competition. The reason Hall and Oates finally met was the gunfire at the ballroom, but in order for them to collaborate, it also took a war and unpaid rent. Altogether the story of Hall and Oates is pretty wild, and you can read about it at Mental Floss.

ついに立体的に動いて見える錯視が完成しました。
キューブが回転して見えますね？
止まっています pic.twitter.com/nyyWdr5O1E

— じゃがりきん (@jagarikin) February 14, 2020

Go ahead, start the playback, focus on one box, or better yet, one part of a box, and watch it "move," yet not go anywhere. This is an example of the the reverse phi illusion. Sora News explains it further.

In very simplified terms, when our eyes see sudden transitions from either light to dark or dark to light, our brains perceive it as motion happening. Take yet another look at @jagarikin’s GIF, and you’ll notice that the edges of the cubes’ blue frames have a sliver of color to them. Sometimes they’re white, sometimes they’re gray, and sometimes they’re black, and as they’re cycling from one to the next, the video’s background is doing the same thing, and the result is the illusionary “rotation” of the cubes.

-via Boing Boing

Chris Hallbeck of Maximumble really maxes out his cartoon today with this story. It diverges along six different paths. I prefer outcome six, which can be arrived at through two different choices.

Known as the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, and as The Ancient One in Marvel’s Doctor Strange, Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton decided to direct this music video. The stars in this video are not people, however; the stars here are Swinton’s four springer spaniels.

The dogs are filmed in slow motion and comically sped up as they obediently swim to fetch a ball, jump and play-fight in the video.

The video features the voice of countertenor Anthony Roth Constanzo and is produced for Opera Philadelphia's Glass Handel project.

Cute!

Via ClassicFM

(Video Credit: ARConstanzoVEVO/ YouTube)

Filled with protein and other nutrients which help in keeping our eyes, muscles, and bones, healthy, are eggs. They also might be perhaps the most versatile food in the world, as we can cook them in various ways. We can fry them, boil them, or use them for baking.

Eggs might also be the most confusing food out there as well. Experts can’t seem to agree if eggs are really good or bad for a person’s health. So are they good or bad?

If you’re generally in good health and don’t have heart disease or high cholesterol, eggs can be part of a healthy diet when eaten in moderation. Eggs are good for us for a lot of different reasons ― they’re unprocessed, rich in protein, low in calories and contain healthy fats and other nutrients.

Here we have it: the answer to this question.

Now that we know that eggs are generally good for us, the next question that we have to ask is, how many eggs should we ideally eat a day?

See the answer over at HuffPost.

(Image Credit: stevepb/ Pixabay)

Despite being 142 minutes long, The Rise of Skywalker didn't have time explain how the Emperor of the original trilogy managed to survive falling down a bottomless shaft to return thirty years later (I'm of the opinion that it should have been two movies). But now the novelization of the film is ready to hit bookstores, and at least one secret has been revealed.

Although the novelization isn't officially on sale until March 17, Lucasfilm Publishing decided to sell advance copies at this weekend's C2E2 in Chicago and passages have begun appearing online. The book does indeed confirm that the Emperor's spirit has been transferred into a clone body. When Kylo Ren arrives on Exegol and encounters Palpatine, he looks closely at the machinery the Emperor is physically attached to, and recognizes it from his studies of the Clone Wars. He then deduces Palpatine's dark side spirit is too strong for the clone body, and is causing serious degeneration to it.

There's more of an explanation at Screen Rant, although it's not all that satisfying to anyone who wants Star Wars to make complete narrative sense. -via Uproxx

Katie Camarena of Porterville, California baits thieves with tools left in the back of her truck at night. When the criminals approach, a motion-activated sprinkler sprays them. Fox News reports:

"Our flood light didn’t seem to scare them off, so we decided to have a little fun with a motion-activated sprinkler that has an impressive amount of pressure," Katie Camarena wrote on Facebook.

"Our flood light didn’t seem to scare them off, so we decided to have a little fun with a motion-activated sprinkler that has an impressive amount of pressure," Katie Camarena wrote on Facebook.

-via Dave Barry

CGP Grey (previously at Neatorama) can make the most esoteric subject interesting, because he brings us a slew of information we didn't know, and didn't know we need to know. But we do. So what do you know about tumbleweeds? They aren't just an Old West thing; tumbleweeds are an invasive species native to Russia that caused problems for settlers and still cause problems for modern civilization.

One of the many entertaining things I found as a child was to watch rain droplets roll down a window when it’s raining. It also is satisfying to watch two tiny droplets become a little bit bigger when they merge into one. Scientists just did the latter in a lab, and it became more satisfying to see.

Two synchronized cameras, shooting up to 25,000 frames a second, recorded different angles of the droplet interaction. As one dyed droplet was dripped from a pump, landing next to a clear droplet sitting on a slide, both a side-on and underneath view allowed researchers to study both surface and internal changes to the droplets.

“In the past, there have been instances when two droplets impact and you were left wondering whether they have mixed or has one droplet just passed over the other,” Dr Alfonso Castrejón-Pita, an associate professor and co-author of the study, based at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. “Having two cameras record the droplet interaction from different viewpoints answers that question.”

Breathtaking.

(Image Credit: University of Leeds)

It is a common culture that you take a picture of your game after a successful hunt. But what if your game were vegetables, instead of animals?

Check out these photos of vegans hunting vegetables, over at Sad And Useless.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

In order to survive even in the harshest conditions, a soldier must have excellent survival skills. In order to acquire these survival skills, the soldier must rigorously train both his mind and body for countless hours.

Driving can be seen as a common and ordinary skill. But for these Chinese soldiers stationed in Tibet, they take driving to the next level. In order to pass their road tests, they should be able to drift at a speed of around 60 km/hr (which is about 37mph), parallel park at high speeds with amazing precision, and keep their tires on very narrow tracks.

(Video Credit: South China Morning Post/ YouTube)

Octolab acquitted a baby Atlantic white-spotted octopus (Callistoctopus macropus), also known as a grass octopus. They became enamored of him because he's just so cute!

When this little Atlantic White-Spotted Octopus arrived at Octolab, everyone immediately fell in love with him. He was the cutest little octopus we ever laid eyes on. We prepared a little habitat for him and gave him a couple days to get acclimated. When he got used to his surroundings, he was immediately drawn to us as much as we were to him.

There's nothing that will drawn in a marine biologist like an affectionate response from a baby.

Maria had worked at Wendy's for a year, but a new set of managers were being really hard on her. One even called her a "lost cause" in front of customers. So she did what we all wish we could do, at one time or another. She lined up a new job, finished her shift with a cleanup out of respect for her co-workers, announced she was quitting, and then climbed out the drive-through window and ran away! Better yet, she got it all on video, which has gone viral on TikTok. Read the story and see the related videos and responses at The Daily Dot.

(Image credit: Maria Kukulak)

Remember when Luke and Laura got married on General Hospital? That was the peak of the 1980s soap opera craze. People were setting their VCRs, gathering for binge-watching parties, and forming discussion groups. ABC's 1984 Olympics coverage was even interrupted to update viewers on their favorite soaps.   

In the early 1980s, soaps became common cultural currency. The 1981 wedding of Luke and Laura attracted the largest audience for a daytime soap episode in US television history. A surfeit of media attention to the wedding was paired with a boom in the merchandising of ancillary products such as soap-inspired T-shirts and board games, celebrities declaring their soap fandom, and large groups of college students gathering in communal campus spaces to watch the daily installments.

That audiences beyond the housewife had become so invested in soap opera accorded it a new level of respect, but this respect assumed that 80s soaps were “better” than the daytime dramas of the past; the soaps’ greater cultural legitimacy was dependent on a distancing from their feminized history.

The rise and fall of the soap opera craze was due to several trends that collided, from cultural shifts to world news to technology. But it reinforced community television, in which people bonded over their favorite fictional worlds. Read about soaps in the 1980s at LitHub. -via Digg